I have received an email from a person that says that my blog claims to talk about SEO, social and inbound marketing topics but most of the posts he noticed are mostly related to SEO and link building.

Guess what? He is right and I have been writing more on the SEO side but now I am writing on different inbound marketing channels like the last post I wrote on Community Building.

This post is more about my latest fail and what I learnt from it, so here I go!

No matter what niche you are working in, social networking has become a part of your routine and you will hardly find people around that do not have a Facebook or a Twitter account. If you are a business owner or a digital marketing strategist you probably are busy dealing with clients, outreaching to prospects, technical stuff, team management and more so it is very obvious that you don’t get much time to use your social accounts and stay connected with your friends.

On the other side of the table your friends and followers expect you to stay active and connected with them and if not sometime you lose some of your most needed connections. The question is how to manage everything at the same time?

Automated Tweets/Status Updates:

Just write a customized birthday message of your friend and schedule it for his/her birthday which is lets say 4 days later! Or schedule your tweet that later goes live during the course of the day from time to time while you are doing your work! This is absolutely awesome.

There are multiple softwares that allow you to do that and one of the awesome softwares that I started using was Buffer App.

Buffer app allows you to set tweets, Facebook statuses, and LinkedIn shares for future. You can set your desired time and it will automatically publish the tweets or share on behalf of you on the time you have selected.

As Twitter is my major focus so I was emphasizing on tweets, although I also set Facebook and LinkedIn. Initially it simply had an awesome impact as I was getting an amazing click rate for each of my tweet.

Also my followers were increasing with a slow passé.

My Klout rank did also increase.

But…

At the same time I was losing something: my favorite followers, real and insightful interaction with other peers within my industry!

Finally I got a tweet from Kristen of Aboutus.org who was irritated from my buffered apps!

Instead of saying bush off I realized what I am loosing so I thanked Kristina for being so constructive and turned off my auto tweet instantly!

What I learned from this!

Here are the following things I learned from this fail!

– Never (ever) dance on the number game

Do not care about the number unless you want to present yourself as a jack shit to others in the community. Don’t care (ever) if inactive and unknown people have started unfollowing you and focus on people who are active, engaging and are part of discussions and real communication.

The amount of spam is bigger than you think so let the bots unfollow you and you should take care of the people who are important to you!

- Take out time, if you care

If you think that social interaction and communication is important for you and your business then try to manage and allocate time for this. I would advise you to set timings instead of being online all the time so that your followers and people who connect with you on regular basis know when you will be available.

– It’s your Twitter account, not a news channel

I learned this the harder way! We need to remember that twitter or any other social networks is to share your interest and activities. It is not a news channel that requires an update after every hour or two to maintain its TRPs.

- Listen to others

Probably the only thing I did right and on time!

When people DM you or openly message you that you are wrong, do listen to them instead of ignoring or starting a fight! Try and neutrally analyse what you are up to and act accordingly.

After all you are a human being and humans naturally do take a nap, lunch, dinner, movie, walk, have fun and more so if you are going to keep updating your Twitter account with an article after every two hours, you are not handling your Twitter account the way you are supposed but rather like a news channel that updates you with new information after every hour.

Automating/Scheduling tweets and shares is a bad idea:Yes and No!

If you are using or planning to use this feature the way I did, then it is probably the worst idea ever and can really hurt your reputation.

But if you are using this to re-share your written posts at the time when you will not be available or to inform the audience from a different time zone then this may prove to benefit you.

I believe this feature is not so bad especially if you are living in a different time zone than your targeted audience but you should not lose that natural, personal feel to your tweets. Take some time out to stay active and participate in discussion/chats around instead of acting like a new channel’s Twitter account that keeps you updated with news on hourly basis.

8 Comments

Hey, Moosa i set two website tweets which automate my account but my account increasing in number of followers and all are good same reputable industry geeks which i am focusing that is #SEO yes if you set lots of automated tweets it will hurt but if you will set same niche website tweets like i set #SEJ and #SEL tweets and that works for me because all my followers like to read these topics.

I believe interesting reads are not really the problem here! I have set some of the awesome posts I know for each day… I guess the problem is how interactive you are… if you are sending all automated tweets and not interacting at all… it will hurt over the period of time!

Yeah you are right i agree with your this sentence “Interacting at all” but Bro you are interacting all the time so will this sentence work for you? Will some good automated tweets will hurt you. I don’t think so. #justmyopinion

I have been testing it for a while, and kept a strong check on unfollowers and felt it did not harm me as such.

Around 5-8 people unfollow me weekly but they are not from my niche or either I don’t follow them other than that many friends from reputed SEO organization RT my tweets. I guess it varies from perspn to person as well, and may be your followers need your interaction much instead to see your tweets!

Additionally I pay keen attention to big fishes following me, I RT them regularly or reply to their tweets, which is an effective way to remain engaged with them.

Totally agree, I’ve been using TwitterFeed for ages now to auto post tweets and it’s turning into a put of a pain in the ass as of now.
I need a software that can integrate @’ing the content writers as well, rather than just giving the title, a cut of description and a link :/